Four questions before you sell your time: the ceiling, the floor, the tax and the exit

There is no shortage of lists of side hustle ideas. There is a shortage of ways to compare them. The four questions below turn any idea into four numbers, and the numbers can be compared.

1. What is the ceiling?

For anything paid by the hour, the ceiling is hours available × rate. Ten hours a week at $40 is $20,800 a year, and no amount of effort moves it without changing one of the two terms. Writing the ceiling down is the fastest way to find out whether an idea can do the job it is being asked to do.

For something built once — a course, a template, a product, a piece of software — the ceiling is not hours. It is the size of the market times the share that will pay. That is much harder to estimate and much higher, which is the whole appeal, and the reason the second question matters more for these.

2. What is the floor?

The floor is the money spent before the first dollar arrives, plus the hours spent that could have been sold. Tutoring has a floor near zero. A product has a floor of every hour spent building it, valued at whatever those hours would otherwise have earned — and the possibility that nobody buys. The honest floor on a built-once idea is the entire build, lost.

3. What is the after-tax, after-cost rate?

Gross hourly pay is the headline; net hourly pay is the truth. Subtract the platform's cut, the car if there is one, the tax, and the unpaid hours — travel, admin, waiting. An app job advertised at $25 an hour with a 25% platform fee, 10 unpaid minutes an hour and a 30% tax rate is paying $10.94 an hour net.

4. Can it be sold, scaled or stopped?

Hours sold stop the moment the seller stops. A built thing keeps selling for a while, and sometimes can be sold outright. A client list has value; a reputation on a platform does not transfer off it. None of this decides which idea is better. It decides what the idea is, so that it is not mistaken for something else.